Drawing on data from Bristol’s National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), the study examined 4,829 deaths of children up to age 10 which occurred in England between April 2019 and March 2022. Researchers used a statistical technique called the Poisson model, to derive the relative risk, comparing children with, or without, neonatal illness on risk of death.

 The study built on earlier work by the same group which showed that 42% of all child deaths occurred within 28 days of birth; it found that, further, perinatal events like preterm birth, perinatal brain injury and neonatal infections had an impact on child survival for many years after.

 Furthermore, the increased risk applied across a range of causes. Children affected by perinatal events were found to be over-represented among deaths due to infections and sudden, unexplained deaths in infancy and childhood. 

Overall the team found 3,456 (71.6%) of the child deaths were among children who had evidence of some neonatal illness. Of these, 3,083 (82.7%) were children who died before 1 year of age, and 373 (33.9%) were those who died over the next nine years. This new evidence suggests that improvements to perinatal health and preterm births as well as a focus on reducing brain injury around birth could improve child health in the future. 

Read the full University of Bristol news item

'Newborn health and child mortality across England' by Karen Luyt et al. in JAMA Network Open [open access]